How crackers ransack passwords - Sort of...

   I am not trying to make this the password rant blog.  But we just can't go a full week without more news about password problems!

   Last week the excellent tech new site, Ars Technica, did a feature article in which they had first a journalist, then three different password hacking experts, try to decrypt passwords from an encrypted password file.  They were all quite successful... frighteningly so.
   Steve Gibson discussed this for a bit in Security Now episode 406.

   But, I think there were some critical flaws in the test.  And there were also some excellent lessons.

   I'll comment on the article using the sandwich method, starting with what was good...